Category: Classic Films (9+)

The three-hour long Dogville is a hugely ambitious movie which plays out across a single, black and white set. There are at most three walls, one car and a handful of chairs to be found in the entire film: outside of that, there is almost nothing besides the actors and some chalk lines on the floor to tell us where houses and gardens are supposed to be.

The theatrical set design is unignorable. It’s the first thing any viewer of Dogville will notice, and it’s a quite brilliant concept. Von Trier stages his movie as if it were a play which the viewer was moving inside of, lending it a spontaneity and strong sense of presence. We feel right up close to Nicole Kidman et al as we watch them perform. But at the same time, this is juxtaposed with jittery camera movements and subtle editing cuts which deliberately strip away the illusion of film.

The effect is incredibly unsettling at first. We are left with almost nothing to cling on to except the actors and their performances, so it helps that these are uniformly fantastic. Nicole Kidman gives an astounding performance that is vulnerable, mysterious and thoughtful in equal measure, while Paul Bettany is also great as the idealistic and conflicted Tom.

By taking away so much, Von Trier asks us to consider more carefully the things that are left. There is lots of symbolism in Dogville, some very overt, some less so. In the prologue, Tom and Ben play checkers but realize they “can’t play the game with a missing piece” right before Grace arrives. When she does, she runs up the mountain but is warned prophetically by Tom that “it’s a very nasty drop”. Fall from grace, anyone?

The religious undertones of the film heighten as it progresses. One later scene finds Nicole Kidman rather allegorically spread out on a bed of apples, signalling temptation. This develops into the central thread of the movie, as Dogville becomes a metaphorical Eden and issues of judgment and community, which germinate in the film’s first hour or so, pull back to a more universal scale.

The setup is fantastic, and the way in which Von Trier entangles each character in his web is fascinating and sometimes excruciating to watch. If I had one slight complaint, though, I do think some of the scenes leading up to Dogville’s gloriously nihilistic ending were a bit too heavy-handed with their philosophizing.

But any minor complaints are eradicated by those closing scenes, and the utterly evil credit sequence which follows. A montage of human poverty and suffering set to David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’? Are you fucking kidding me, Lars?

Dogville’s ideas might not be revolutionary, but the way in which it combines them is. It is something like a cross between Paradise Lost, Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett, with a healthy dose of malicious wit and humour thrown into the mix. It is unlike any other movie I could care to name, and while it is certainly not an easy watch, Dogville is a groundbreaking and ambitious movie from one of the most instantly recognizable artists in modern cinema.

A pure flight of imagination which tells a very grounded story of grief and loss.

I think animation might just be the perfect medium in which to tell a fairytale. The vibrant colours, the exaggerated expressions which are more readable for children, the relative ease of drawing as opposed to filming things like spirits and magic…they all lend themselves to stories which present truths and lessons about the world around us in a form that captures the imagination and stirs the sense of adventure inherent in both children and adults.

Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea is one such story: a magical realist fairytale which contains no small number of fantastical creatures and landscapes. It is a pure flight of the imagination, but one that takes to the skies in order to tell a very grounded and affecting story about grief and trauma. There are all kinds of important lessons to be found within this movie about how human beings deal with emotions (including one beautiful scene in which literally bottled up emotions are cathartically released), and they’re just as applicable to children as they are to adults.

The level of emotional and narrative nuance in Song of the Sea can’t help but recall the work of Studio Ghibli, which is a clear influence here. This is a movie as steeped in Irish folklore and mythology as Ghibli films are in their Japanese counterpart: Gaelic songs, dusky pubs, Yeats poems, and a fantastic soundtrack with many elements of traditional Irish folk music.

But Song of the Sea has a visual and production style all of its own. Where Ghibli films are often very dynamic, Song of the Sea is graceful and highly composed. Visually it looks something like a cross between Gustav Klimt and a runic cave painting, full of swirling shapes, patterns, and flowing streams of golden blue. Many of the drawn backgrounds are 3D spaces flattened into a 2D plane, which creates a wonderfully disorientating and abstracted effect.

I found certain sequences within this film really just awe-inspiring: Saorsie’s midnight swim with the seals, the descent into the holy well and the ancient fairy’s nest of flowing hair, riding the spirit-dogs to the lighthouse, the approach to the old witches house, the entire ending sequence…Song of the Sea continually surprised and amazed me throughout its relatively brief ninety minute runtime.

My only teeny weeny complaint is that some of the voice acting on the incidental characters was a bit lacking, but all the main characters were very effectively brought to life. Aside from that, I have nothing but gushing praise for Song of the Sea and can’t wait to see where Tomm Moore and co go next. I’d really like to see them go in a completely new direction and get out from under the somewhat daunting shadow of Ghibli influence – I think they’re more than talented enough to do it. But even if they don’t, Song of the Sea is a unique triumph all of its own.

Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is a searing and utterly relentless look at the intricacies of justice and power. Beneath its surface level of delicate and highly crafted conversations there bubbles a furious political anger of a kind we don’t often see in Kubrick.

Full Metal Jacket and Dr Strangelove are political movies, of course, but the former is a much more personal portrait of the horrors of war, while the latter mounts its attack with acidic satire. Paths of Glory, on the other hand, is an ambitious, top-down look at how persuasion and manipulation are the real weapons of power, not rifles.

In this respect it proves infinitely more horrifying than watching hordes of soldiers being torn to shreds by gunfire. The cold, detached manner in which human lives are weighed as percentage casualties, the General placing greater import on earning medals than the lives of his men…this is the bureaucracy of mass murder, and it is terrifyingly real.

There is an almost Kafkaesque quality in the way Paths of Glory portrays its characters as fruitlessly combating systems of power and law. The trial scene in particular is chilling to watch: a brutal cocktail of fear, misdirection and complete chance culminating in three men’s fate being awfully sealed.

Some war movies appeal to our sense of pathos by showing us the bloody reality of the front line and the trenches. They’re well within their right to do so: these are things which have to be seen to be fully comprehended for those who weren’t there.

But Paths of Glory is perhaps more horrifying than any of these movies in the way it reveals the unseen atrocities of war. It resists sentiment until its very last scene, in which one single moment of devastating emotional catharsis brings the movie to a rapturous and ambiguous end. I had to pick my jaw off the floor.

To me, this is Kubrick’s best film outside of 2001. It is not quite as visually daring and composed as many of his lauded classics, but Paths of Glory is sharp, nuanced, and economical, never putting a single foot out of line.

Scorsese proves himself a master puppeteer of the unconscious with After Hours, his batshit insane, hilarious and genuinely horrifying descent into a dream/nightmare New York, filtered through the eyes of word processor Paul Hackett, who is having a really, really bad night.

What begins as an offbeat comedy quickly devolves into madness. Logicless, liminal moments of horror and hilarity rub up uncomfortably close together: Marcy recounts being raped, and then tells Paul about her ex-boyfriend’s Wizard of Oz obession. A phallic zoom+pan into a telephone as the prospect of sex appears hints at the movies impending dive into the psychological deep end.

But that’s just the beginning. Like many bad dreams, what starts off as a mundane and jumbled assortment of half-coherent moments becomes an avalanch of fear and insecurity. Suddenly, Paul finds himself on a delightfully inescapable dream-quest to do one simple thing: return home.

What is really intriguing to me about After Hours is just how carefully thought out all of the psychological elements are. It feels like there could be a whole second movie made to tell the story of guilt, repression, fantasy, abandonment and ice cream trucks which bubbles below the surface of After Hours.

And the real-life, working mechanics of dreams are captured so perfectly, too. After a scene in which Paul experiences a strong feeling of guilt, there’s a brilliant moment in which he tries to jump the barrier of the subway and gets caught by the guard. It perfectly illustrates the banal and anxious way that feelings like guilt really operate on the subconscious.

Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker go to great lengths to recreate that feeling in the film’s visuals, too. The roaming camera and subtly disjointed editing create an uncomfortable feeling of instability. And quick-cut moments like a pair of keys suddenly dropping to Paul out a window are jarring, maintaining an atmosphere of constant tension even during moments of levity.

It all comes to a rapturous, screwball climax in the film’s unpredictable last half an hour, leaving you rubbing your eyes in disbelief as the credits roll: did that really just fucking happen?

Much like The King of Comedy before it, I think After Hours is criminally underrated in Scorsese’s filmography. This is an ambitious yet hilarious psychological drama that has none of the codified twists and turns we associate with the genre (thats you, Shutter Island). Instead, After Hours is another unique and unforgettable film from one of cinema’s greatest living directors.
9.6/10